Russell Hoban

THE BAT TATTOO

Book review by Anthony Campbell. The review is licensed under a Creative
Commons License.
This is one of Hoban's gentler fictions, with a happy ending. It has
three narrators who speak in turn: Sarah Varley, Roswell Clark, and
Adelbert Delarue. Roswell and Sarah are both wounded people: Roswell
drove while drunk and the resulting accident killed his wife, while
Sarah was married to an unsatisfactory man who is also dead. Both
Roswell and Sarah decide to have bats tattooed on their arms as emblems
of good luck. Much of the novel is concerned with how their lives come
to intertwine, each finding something in the other that had been missing
for them up to now. Quite a lot of the story is told in flashback.

I found Adelbert a less satisfying creation than the
other two. He is an enormously rich man living in Paris. He has inherited
his wealth from his father, who acquired it in ways that are not spelled
out but appear to have been shady or disreputable in some way.

Roswell is a designer of mechanical crash dummies, and Adelbert
commissions him to produce several pornographic models. These are so
successful that Adelbert becomes convinced that Roswell is going to
become a first-rate artist, and he eagerly awaits the appearance of a
masterpiece. As might be expected, this turns out to be an anticlimax.

There is plenty of humour in the book, superimposed on a deeper sadness.
And Hoban has an opportunity to poke fun at much meretricious modern
art.